Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall (ebook reader with built in dictionary TXT) 📕

Of the inner quality that enables matter to attract matter we know nothing; and the law of conservation makes no statement regarding that quality. It takes the facts of attraction as they stand, and affirms only the constancy of working-power. That power may exist in the form of MOTION; or it may exist in the form of FORCE, with distance to act through. The former is dynamic energy, the latter is potential energy, the constancy of the sum of both being affirmed by the law of conservation. The convertibility of natural forces consists solely in transformations of dynamic into potential, and of potential into dynamic, energy, which are incessantly going on.

In no other sense has the convertibility of force, at present, any scientific meaning.

By the contraction of a muscle a man lifts a weight from the earth.

But the muscle can contract only through the oxidation of its own tissue or of the blood passing through it. Molecular motion is thus converted into mechanical motion. Supposing the muscle to contract without raising the weight, oxidation would also occur, but the whole of the heat produced by this oxidation would be liberated in the muscle itself. Not so when it performs external work; to do that work a certain definite portion of the heat of oxidation must be expended. It is so expended in pulling the weight away from the earth. If the weight be permitted to fall, the heat generated by its collision with the earth would exactly make up for that lacking in the muscle during the lifting of the weight. In the case here supposed, we have a conversion of molecular muscular action into potential energy of gravity; and a conversion of that potential energy into heat; the heat, however, appearing at a distance from its real origin in the muscle. The whole process consists of a transference of molecular motion from the muscle to the weight, and gravitating force is the mere go-between, by means of which the transference is effected.

These considerations will help to clear our way to the conception of the transformations which occur when a wire is moved across the lines of force in a magnetic field. In this case it is commonly said we have a conversion of magnetism into electricity. But let us endeavour to understand what really occurs. For the sake of simplicity, and with a view to its translation into a different one subsequently, let us adopt for a moment the provisional conception of a mixed fluid in the wire, composed of positive and negative electricities in equal quantities, and therefore perfectly neutralizing each other when the wire is still. By the motion of the wire, say with the hand, towards the magnet, what the Germans call a Scheidungs-Kraft—a separating force—is brought into play.

This force tears the mixed fluids asunder, and drives them in two currents, the one positive and the other negative, in two opposite directions through the wire. The presence of these currents evokes a force of repulsion between the magnet and the wire; and to cause the one to approach the other, this repulsion must be overcome.

The overcoming of this repulsion is, in fact, the work done in separating and impelling the two electricities. When the wire is moved away from the magnet, a Scheidungs-Kraft, or separating force, also comes into play; but now it is an attraction that has to be surmounted. In surmounting it, currents are developed in directions opposed to the former; positive takes the place of negative, and negative the place of positive; the overcoming of the attraction being the work done in separating and impelling the two electricities.

The mechanical action occurring here is different from that occurring where a sphere of soft iron is withdrawn from a magnet, and again attracted. In this case muscular force is expended during the act of separation; but the attraction of the magnet effects the reunion. In the case of the moving wire also we overcome a resistance in separating it from the magnet, and thus far the action is mechanically the same as the separation of the sphere of iron.

But after the wire has ceased moving, the attraction ceases; and so far from any action occurring similar to that which draws the iron sphere back to the magnet, we have to overcome a repulsion to bring them together.

There is no potential energy conferred either by the removal or by the approach of the wire, and the only power really transformed or converted, in the experiment, is muscular power. Nothing that could in strictness be called a conversion of magnetism into electricity occurs. The muscular oxidation that moves the wire fails to produce within the muscle its due amount of heat, a portion of that heat, equivalent to the resistance overcome, appearing in the moving wire instead.

Is this effect an attraction and a repulsion at a distance? If so, why should both cease when the wire ceases to move? In fact, the deportment of the wire resembles far more that of a body moving in a resisting medium than anything else; the resistance ceasing when the motion is suspended. Let us imagine the case of a liquid so mobile that the hand may be passed through it to and fro, without encountering any sensible resistance. It resembles the motion of a conductor in the unexcited field of an electro-magnet. Now, let us suppose a body placed in the liquid, or acting on it, which confers upon it the property of viscosity; the hand would no longer move freely. During its motion, but then only, resistance would be encountered and overcome. Here we have rudely represented the case of the excited magnetic field, and the result in both cases would be substantially the same. In both cases heat would, in the end, be generated outside of the muscle, its amount being exactly equivalent to the resistance overcome.

Let us push the analogy a little further; suppose in the case of the fluid rendered viscous, as assumed a moment ago, the viscosity not to be so great as to prevent the formation of ripples when the hand is passed through the liquid. Then the motion of the hand, before its final conversion into heat, would exist for a time as wave-motion, which, on subsiding, would generate its due equivalent of heat. This intermediate stage, in the case of our moving wire, is represented by the period during which the electric current is flowing through it; but that current, like the ripples of our liquid, soon subsides, being, like them, converted into heat.

Do these words shadow forth anything like the reality? Such speculations cannot be injurious if they are enunciated without dogmatism. I do confess that ideas such as these here indicated exercise a strong fascination on my mind. Is then the magnetic field really viscous, and if so, what substance exists in it and the wire to produce the viscosity? Let us first look at the proved effects, and afterwards turn our thoughts back upon their cause.

When the wire approaches the magnet, an action is evoked within it, which travels through it with a velocity comparable to that of light.

One substance only in the universe has been hitherto proved competent to transmit power at this velocity; the luminiferous ether. Not only its rapidity of progression, but its ability to produce the motion of light and heat, indicates that the electric current is also motion.[1] Further, there is a striking resemblance between the action of good and bad conductors as regards electricity, and the action of diathermanous and adiathermanous bodies as regards radiant heat. The good conductor is diathermanous to the electric current; it allows free transmission without the development of heat. The bad conductor is adiathermanous to the electric current, and hence the passage of the latter is accompanied by the development of heat. I am strongly inclined to hold the electric current, pure and simple, to be a motion of the ether alone; good conductors being so constituted that the motion may be propagated through their ether without sensible transfer to their atoms, while in the case of bad conductors this transfer is effected, the transferred motion appearing as heat.[2]

I do not know whether Faraday would have subscribed to what is here written; probably his habitual caution would have prevented him from committing himself to anything so definite. But some such idea filled his mind and coloured his language through all the later years of his life. I dare not say that he has been always successful in the treatment of these theoretic notions. In his speculations he mixes together light and darkness in varying proportions, and carries us along with him through strong alternations of both. It is impossible to say how a certain amount of mathematical training would have affected his work. We cannot say what its influence would have been upon that force of inspiration that urged him on; whether it would have daunted him, and prevented him from driving his adits into places where no theory pointed to a lode. If so, then we may rejoice that this strong delver at the mine of natural knowledge was left free to wield his mattock in his own way. It must be admitted, that Faraday’s purely speculative writings often lack that precision which the mathematical habit of thought confers. Still across them flash frequent gleams of prescient wisdom which will excite admiration throughout all time; while the facts, relations, principles, and laws which his experiments have established are sure to form the body of grand theories yet to come.

Footnotes to Chapter 14

[1] Mr. Clerk Maxwell has recently published an exceedingly important investigation connected with this question. Even in the non-mathematical portions of the memoirs of Mr. Maxwell, the admirable spirit of his philosophy is sufficiently revealed.

As regards the employment of scientific imagery, I hardly know his equal in power of conception and clearness of definition.

[2] One important difference, of course, exists between the effect of motion in the magnetic field, and motion in a resisting medium.

In the former case the heat is generated in the moving conductor, in the latter it is in part generated in the medium.

Chapter 15.

Summary.

When from an Alpine height the eye of the climber ranges over the mountains, he finds that for the most part they resolve themselves into distinct groups, each consisting of a dominant mass surrounded by peaks of lesser elevation. The power which lifted the mightier eminences, in nearly all cases lifted others to an almost equal height. And so it is with the discoveries of Faraday. As a general rule, the dominant result does not stand alone, but forms the culminating point of a vast and varied mass of inquiry. In this way, round about his great discovery of Magneto-electric Induction, other weighty labours group themselves. His investigations on the Extra Current; on the Polar and other Condition of Diamagnetic Bodies; on Lines of Magnetic Force, their definite character and distribution; on the employment of the Induced Magneto-electric Current as a measure and test of Magnetic Action; on the Revulsive Phenomena of the magnetic field, are all, notwithstanding the diversity of title, researches in the domain of Magneto-electric Induction.

Faraday’s second group of researches and discoveries embrace the chemical phenomena of the current. The dominant result here is the great law of definite Electrochemical Decomposition, around which are massed various researches on Electrochemical Conduction and on Electrolysis both with the Machine and with the Pile. To this group also belongs his analysis of the Contact Theory, his inquiries as to the Source of Voltaic Electricity, and his final development of the Chemical Theory of the pile.

His third great discovery is the Magnetization of Light, which I should liken to the Weisshorn among mountains—high, beautiful,